Evan Roth’s Ink Fingerprint Paintings Track Touchscreen Routines

American artist Evan Roth is no stranger to subverting digital culture into progressive art. In the past, Roth has developed a wall of gifs for Occupy the Internet and hacked the internet cache to create self-portraits, both of which fit neatly into his artist statement of “visualizing and archiving culture through unintended uses of technologies”. Drawing inspiration from hacker culture and philosophy, Roth helped found the Graffiti Research Lab, which merges graffiti with technology via projectile LEDs, which he used to famously tag the Brooklyn Bridge in 2008. For his Multi-Touch Paintings series, Roth tapped quite literally into a newly universal habit among people fully plugged into the digital era: that of using touchscreen devices. Created by “performing routine tasks on milt-touch hand held computing devices,” Roth used tracing paper and an ink pad to turn impressions of each finger swipe into stark paintings.

Each of Roth’s ink paintings are named after the task they’re depicting, from an entire wall of levels from Angry Birds to Twitter and e-mail check-ins. By turning mundane procedures we make on a day to day basis on our phones and tablets into textural studies, Roth blurs the line between the corporeal and the digital. One can’t help but be reminded of fingerprinting for identification when looking at the paintings, drawing a connection between the all-encompassing nature of technology in modern society and the lasting effects that may hold over our identities in the future. With iPhones that now literally use your fingerprint to access the device, it seems as though Roth’s paintings are even more prescient now than they were when he first premiered them in 2011.